Sunday, March 3, 2013

DOWNGRADED: Popeye (Nintendo, 1982-1983)

I thought it would be fun to showcase the occasional little
examination of video game ports that had to make sacrifices to fit on
home hardware.

I was playing Popeye tonight at Pinballz
arcade and not only is it much more difficult than the NES version,
Nintendo used an interesting method of creating high-res character
sprites on low-res backgrounds. While this results in character detail
that honestly amazed me for such an old game, it made porting the game
to consoles tricky. So, how did the NES version handle it?

"YOU TRIED"

To be
fair, the NES port is very faithful to the arcade, gameplay-wise. This
was in the era of Donkey Kong and the original Mario Bros. as well, when
cartridge space was tight...how tight? A hefty 8 kilobytes of "character"
(graphics) data to work with. Well blow me down.